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Monday, June 30, 2014

Me And My Belly

I estimate that
each of my legs weighs sixty pounds.
That leaves a hundred pounds for the rest of my body. My head probably weights twenty, which
leaves eighty for the arms and torso.
My belly, that piece of me that surprised me totally when it arrived in
the years between forty and forty five, my belly must take up sixty pounds of
that remaining eighty. It's a classic
middle-aged man's belly. It is
true, I eat too much and most of that eating is in bed. Every night of my entire life I have munched
or crunched something as I read myself to sleep.

My theory is that I am
seeking a substitute for breast milk.
My early days on this planet were not a paradise of blissful bonding
between my mother and child. My father tells
me that I had night terrors. I tell him
that if I was terrified of anything, it was my mother.

During my futile attempts to rid
myself of this belly I’ve done ten kinds of abdominal exercises, hundreds of
reps daily, for months and months on end.
My belly didn’t get smaller. It
got bigger.

Why was I
exercising my six-pack this way? What
myth did I buy into? If I wanted to get
rid of my belly, I should have done absolutely nothing. I should have, with the wisdom of hindsight, accepted the fact that this belly is here to stay, it's a natural by
product of aging. It just IS, and why
is that so horrible? Why is everyone
buying gizmos, electronic abdominal muscle stimulators? Why do they buy
gimmicks with names like Abbacizers, Sixpackalongs, Abhancers? Why do people
hang from bars and pull themselves up and back, up and back, or lay tilted on
long boards, going up and back, up and back?
There’s more than a little insanity in this vain pursuit. The obsession with the six pack is about
vanity and its monster shadow, insecurity.
Our culture pumps its toxic load of media venom into our collective
psychic bloodstream so that we feel inadequate if our bodies don’t adhere to
some contemporary ideal of beauty. For
the moment, that ideal has become horrifically thin; it forms the ironic
counterpoint to the visible reality that Americans have gotten chronically fat.

We’re a culture with a lot of
food. I mean, a lot lot lot of
food. There’s never been a civilization
in the history of the world with more food.
It’s hardly surprising that everyone eats a lot, gets fat and the ideal
of beauty is to have arms and legs so thin that you have to walk around storm
drains lest you slip through the bars and get washed out to sea.

I wish we could weigh thoughts just
as we weigh butter, or scrap metal. How much would my daily output of
body-shame weigh? How many pounds,
kilos, ounces, grams would every thought weigh, those thoughts that go, “Oh I
wish this belly would flatten out, it makes me feel so unattractive, so
grotesque?”

People who are at war with their
bodies spend money on ridiculous products. Teeth whiteners! When did this obsession come along? Who cares about teeth whiteners? People who use them look ridiculous. There’s a blinding beam of Cheshire Cat grin
every time they open their mouths, a light so blatantly artificial that it
obscures the rest of the face with its message: “I am insecure and hopelessly vain. I use teeth whiteners.”

This is how to create a market for a
useless product. People will start
fixating on their fatigue-shadows, examining the mirror for any hint of
darkening skin. The stuff will sell
like crazy, as another reason to hate one’s body darkens the horizon of the
national psyche. This insanity is all
about money. People who hate themselves
spend more money, spend compulsively, to cover their unhappiness. It serves the interests of marketers to
create a social condition in which self hatred becomes the paradigm.

I have to ask myself the question,
“Which is worse, being overweight, or being guilty, stressed and ashamed of
being overweight?” Which damages my
health more? I think it’s the
latter. I think that stressing and
hating my body is more toxic than glugging down three milkshakes a day.

How many ridiculous weight-loss products
bloat the bandwidth of the media empires?
How many bogus concoctions feed on the fervent wish that one can lose
pounds and become shapely without any effort?

I have invented my own product to
add to this glut for gluttons: “Thindreme”ä! Here’s the commercial, presented by a
blandly attractive blonde woman in front of a red- white- blue studio set
enhanced by computer graphics showing fat bodies and thin bodies arranged for
before/after comparison.

“Do you dream of going to sleep fat
and waking up thin? Now your dreams can come true! Two tablets of clinically proven Thindreme before bed will melt
the pounds away as you sleep! The more
you sleep the thinner you will get.
This new miracle compound acts upon the metabolism of your slumbering
body and converts fat cells using the principle of DCE, or Dynamic Caloric
Extrapolation. It is a proven fact that
Rapid Eye Movement sleep is an untapped source of caloric output. In other words, REM sleep is exercise! Thindreme has come along to utilize this remarkable
opportunity. The more you dream, the
more weight you lose! Within four to
six weeks you can emerge a brand new person, thin, sexy, appealing, without any
effort on your part! Forget about diet, exercise, lifestyle. You don’t need will power. Thindreme does it for you! Now you can be the man or woman of your
dreams! If you order in the next ten minutes, Thindreme will double your order,
and at no extra cost, will give you this free nose hair trimmer. And there’s
more! We will also add to your order
this stylish miniature folding piano! So pick up the phone, and order now! And
remember, Thindreme is Clinically Proven.” *

I’ve given up trying to rid myself
of this belly. I know that a group of
cannibals would find me delicious. My
bicycle thighs would be a Kentucky Fried delight, the most giant Crispy ever to
appear in a cannibal’s bucket.

When I compare my life to the living
hell in which I see that most people exist, I feel grateful for the good life
that I have. My relationship with my
partner has its sick elements, to be sure, its ‘enablings’ and ‘codependencies’
(how I love this modern language of the heart’s twisted pathways). We don’t fight. If something starts to fester between us, it will come out in a
talk, a gentle but firm confrontation where our fears are expressed and laid to
rest.

This was supposed to be about my
belly, but I can’t write about that part of my personal real estate without
including all kinds of other things in my life. My belly doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it isn’t just floating around
in space, a belly, without connection to the rest of the universe. My belly may
be causing storms on Neptune, for as we have recently discovered, everything
has a connection to everything else.
It’s the Butterfly Effect. Or in
this case, The Belly Effect.

My belly is a dominating presence in
my life. I, who spent my youth being
thin and sinewy, looking like a Hindu holy man from the hippie trail in Nepal,
am now somewhat imprisoned by this entity who sits astride the center of my
body. It goes everywhere with me. My vanity is not the main actor in this dismay. My vanity went out about the same time as my
hair. Well, that’s not exactly
true. I am concerned with how I appear
to other people. The problem is, I know
that the one person least qualified to judge how I appear to other people is
myself. And that is a universal
law. You, who think you look thus and
thus to the outside world, are completely deluded. When you look in the mirror, the information you receive is so
utterly tainted by your needs and dreams that you might as well be looking at a
stranger. I wish people would
understand this.

YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE. YOU NEVER WILL.

There are so many ingredients that
go into an appearance that are invisible to the owner of a human body, that
said owner should just give up. Photographs lie for many reasons. Photos capture one two hundredth of a
second, and in that two hundredth of a second, an expression may be crossing
your face that is otherwise invisible, so quickly do the facial muscles change
with the passing of emotion. That’s why
we often look odd in pictures.
Videotape is in some ways even worse.
I don’t know a single soul who doesn’t cringe when viewing his or
herself on video. Its distortions are
insidious but nonetheless real.

I say this to my fellow humans: do your best to be hygienic, wear clothes
that are comfortable and that please you, and let your nature emerge, because
that’s what happens anyway. Your
appearance is determined by your nature.
The way you look is about energy, not physical features.

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